Employee experience is an important topic many companies are addressing via meaningful work, supportive management, positive work environment, growth opportunity and trust in leadership. But the IT service desk also directly affects employee satisfaction (and employee experience by default) just by helping them recover from technical issues and resume working. Providing effective tools for remote and/or hybrid work is a priority, and IT service desks are in a prominent position to mitigate digital overload many end user employees experience from longer hours online.
These 4 tips can help, by giving employees a way to solve simple problems themselves, collaborate and ask and receive help more efficiently.
Provide a Self-Service Option—or Ticket Deflection
IT service desk analysts are helpful souls, but they are often limited by bandwidth. With another element factoring into their workday, supporting hybrid employees, they are also likely fielding a higher volume of tickets from various sources, often focused around the same recurring topics or issues.
A self-service portal or resource gives employees a place to go for instruction on how to solve the problem themselves. If it’s a quick fix, end users don’t need to submit a ticket and wait on an analyst.
Ticket deflection takes this concept a step further, offering a more effective way to help:
- Employees who may not know anything about the nature of the problem
- Analysts who are short on time
Ticket deflection via Microsoft Teams is ideal—especially in the hybrid work model. Many companies are already embracing Teams as a collaboration and communication tool, facilitating connection for internal teams and external partners. It is fairly intuitive for employees to send an email or chat message to a virtual agent about a technical issue and either receive instruction on how to resolve it or a notification that a ticket has been created all within Microsoft Teams (or Outlook email, if that is preferred). Tikit, a Microsoft Teams IT service desk solution, gives end users various channels to solicit help and engage through the ticket process.
Because the virtual agent intercepts support requests akin to a level 1 tier, analysts can step in and spend time resolving more complicated issues—or issues that are best served by human interaction. Relating at this level is more satisfying for end user and analysts alike.
Strategic Use of Knowledge Management
Some employees enjoy researching for answers and problem-solving. Others may find it frustrating and time-consuming. There are ways to accommodate all with a solution like Tikit.
To make self-service work, articles need to be updated, with easy-to-follow instructions and intuitive use of keywords for easy retrieval. But a solution like Tikit uses a knowledge base as a way to train its artificial intelligence (AI) virtual agent. The agent sees and interprets a request, retrieves knowledge base instruction and serves it to employees requesting help. There are further ways to make the process even more efficient using templates that tighten the process, giving analysts more time for strategic work.
Give Analysts Access and Ways to Collaborate
Microsoft Teams ticketing isn’t just efficient for end user employees requesting help. It gives support analysts a streamlined process and easy to navigate backend to track, manage and resolve tickets in a transparent way.
Tikit gives analysts the ability to manage tickets from web UI, Teams app and mobile Teams app, based on the individual’s preferences. Wherever analysts are working, ticket data is updated and accessible from any channel. Tickets can be worked from various views, including lists and Kanban boards, with updates to activity and ticket history viewable by across the team.
Support teams can manage tickets from a general triage channel in Teams, but Tikit gives analysts the ability to get specific, routing tickets to specified groups and assigning to specific analysts. Visibility into the process and ticket status reduces the need for meetings and helps all involve resolve a greater number of tickets.
Create Growth Opportunities for Service Desk Analysts
By offloading repetitive request and creating more efficiency in ticket management, AI-based service desk solutions like Tikit give support analysts more time to pursue interesting, challenging or strategic problem-solving. The great news is that they also have more time to pursue growth opportunities, and IT managers have an exciting opportunity. What else can the service desk do for the organization and how might employees be enriched by various projects? Now is a great time to get creative, define and redefine IT’s value in the organization.
Check out a demo of Tikit to see how it works. Or better yet, explore Tikit in a free 14-day fully-functional trial with no credit card needed!
